Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our web hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.